7 The neologism, that is the Anthropocene, brings humankind, or ánthrōpos, into conjunction with geological processes, the “-cene” suffix having been modeled on existing geological epochal nomenclature. Moreover, “-cene” (from kainos, meaning “new”) heralds a new age, whether wholly new as in the Holocene (hólos means “whole”) or mostly new as in the Pleistocene (pleīstos, for “most”). This new age of the human thus places human-sized time, with human-sized concerns, ambitions and agency, alongside the dra- matically larger durations of geology. In other words, the juxtaposition inherent in the idea of—and the very word—the Anthropocene is primarily a scalar disjunction, a mismatch between human perception and experience on the one hand and the planetary history of the Earth on the other. As many have pointed out, this sense of dis- junction operates along the axes of space and time. Thus, Timothy Clark has found that “the Anthropocene enacts the demand to think of human life at much broader scales of space and time” (2015, 13), leading to what he terms “Anthropocene disorder” (2015, 139–157), and Amitav Ghosh has suggested that the Anthropocene surfaces “forces of unthinkable magnitude that cre- ate unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space,” the collision of intimacy and vastness creating a “great derangement” (63). The temporal and spatial dimensions of this disorder and derangement have been scrutinized in several other influential investigations. Dipesh Chakrabarty analyzes the difference between the individual and communal longues durées that are the chief concern of conventional historiography and the massive biological timeframes in which species emerge, evolve and, in some cases, become extinct: he makes the case, therefore, for attending to what he calls “species history” (212). Meanwhile, and just as famously, Timothy Morton (2013) coined the phrase “hyperobject” to describe objects, including the concepts and ideas disclosed by the Anthropocene, such as climate change, that are, as he puts it, “massively distributed in space and time relative to humans” (1). Driving this spatial and temporal derangement, of course, is another distinction, namely the gap of perspective between Homo sapiens “We Have Lost Yardsticks by Which to Measure” Arendtian Ethics and the Narration of Scale in the Anthropocene Adeline Johns-Putra DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989-7